Tuesday, 29 July 2014

“We have not overthrown the divine right of Kings to fall
down for the divine right of experts.” So goes the famous quotation from Harold Macmillan.

It cannot
be said, alas, that the current Prime Minister has followed much of his Etonian
forebear’s advice in other areas.Don’t sell off the family silver, being a
start. Macmillan meant this with regard to the privatisation of gas and other
utilities, but it could just as easily be said of the Royal Mail.

But, in this
disdain for expertise, we can see a distinct similarity between the government
of today and that of half a century ago.

The disdain for expertise then, as
evinced by Macmillan’s quotation, had very different reasoning behind it than the
disdain for expertise we see in the coalition today.

Macmillan was exhibiting
(or, more likely, affecting) a distaste for ‘expertise’ as an example of
bourgeois meddling.For him, as with many other self identifying Disraelians of
the time, the near-sacred bond between ruler and ruled could do without the
opinions of white-coated ‘new men’ fixated with numbers and statistics.

How times have changed.

Arguably, the very reason why
many, across the political spectrum, hold expertise in such disdain is
precisely because they often can’t be valued in terms of numbers.

To the minds
of many political commentators, many politicians and, arguably, many amongst
the general public, if something or someone cannot be ascribed a distinct,
empirical value, then it must be worthless.

This is often expressed in our
political sphere in terms of ‘accountability’.Because a member of the House of
Commons has an exact numerical majority by which they can measure themselves, and because business leaders have empirical profit margins by which they might
be measured, and shareholder targets to meet, they are held to be ‘accountable’, and therefore implicitly better placed to give their counsel than those who do
not.

This fetishisation of empiricism in politics exists across the party
divide. The opinions of those without a self-assigned numerical value measured
in either votes or shares, have consistently been sidelined by the all three
major political parties.

For instance, when Alan Johnson sacked Professor David
Nutt his justification was clear: his opinion, as an elected official of a
government with an ascribable majority and so on, trumped Professor Nutt’s advice.

So
it has been also with Govian education reform. The non-experts, be they
government ministers or parents with enough numerical wherewithal (read: money)
to set up Free Schools, must trump the considered opinions of teachers with the
expertise of experience.

It is curious, in a post expenses scandal world,
where trust in both elected politicians and big businesses is inordinately low,
that we as a society should chose to make the numerical hard fact of an elected
mandate or an annual turnover the most important considerations in deciding
whether someone ought to be listened to.

This has been clear recently in the continued fractious
relationship between successive governments and the House of Lords.

As a result
of the recent government reshuffle, for the first time in history the leader of
the Upper House of Parliament will not sit in the Cabinet.

On 28th July the
Lords passed a motion condemning this, tabled by Baroness Boothroyd, considered one of the
finest Commons Speakers of modern times.

The response was
immediate. Politicians and journalists took to Twitter to condemn such ‘navel
gazing’. Stewart Jackson, the Conservative MP for Peterborough denounced it as
an “unelected/unaccountable” body (note the elision of the two) just debating
“their own powers and influence”.

The Lords were accused of being “out of
touch” for daring to debate what actually constitutes an unprecedented
constitutional change.

The implicit line followed by all within the political
bubble who took it upon themselves to criticise was that, because they are unelected,
the Lords have no right to comment.

That a global expert on the constitution
such as Lord Norton of Louth, or any number of former ministers with years and
years of experience behind them, have no right to discuss the implications of
marginalising the Upper House of Parliament, whereas a man who owes his seat to33,973
people in North Oxfordshire does.

When Thomas Carlyle critiqued Benthamite Utilitarianism, he warned that it would reduce “the infinite celestial soul of mankind to a
kind of balance for weighing hay and thistles on.”

He identified the dangers of
a world whereby only numerical value is considered to be important.

We aren’t
quite in thistle weighing territory yet.

But the concept that only those with a
discernible numerical value, be that of a majority or sizeable annual turnover,
have the right to pass comment and partake in the formulation of policy is a
worrying trend that appears to be garnering support across the political
spectrum.

I would humbly suggest that things ought to begin swinging back the
other way- here’s to the (semi) divine right of the experts.

Sunday, 27 July 2014

A talk given at the House of Lords on Wednesday 23rd July 2014, by courtesy of The Lord Stoddart of Swindon:

Late last year
an organisation called the National Secular Society announced that, through lawyers,
it was petitioning the European Court of Human Rights to rule that the next
Coronation to be held in the United Kingdom be, in effect, a state investiture
so as to be more in harmony with Europe.

In a November
2013 statement to the media they said: “Britain’s
current investiture of a monarch with such overt religious associations is an
anomaly within the context of the rest of Europe.”

However, the coronation
of British kings is not at all like the secular state installations of European
monarchs because its thousand year old Christian Coronations are not merely a
formal appointment but a Christian consecration of the monarch creating a
communion between the Monarch and God and between the Monarch and the People.

The words of Dr
Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of York at the coronation of King George V, expresses
this sentiment very clearly.

He said
"The King comes not alone to his hallowing.
He bears his people with him. For the national life, as well as for its
representative, this is a day of consecration ....”

The Coronation
is a time when all subjects of the Queen, whatever their country of
citizenship, are brought together, united in a common purpose, to welcome the
crowning of their King.

It is something that belongs not only to Britain but to
all those countries who have as their sovereign the monarch of the United
Kingdom.

The anointing is
the central act of the religious ceremony and includes the Blessing and
Consecration.

In the twenty-six monarchies left in the world today (other than possibly
the Vatican), only the British monarchs are anointed and consecrated with
sacred oil at their coronation.

What Europhile secularists
fail to appreciate is that Britain is a Christian nation with a Christian
monarchy which is sanctified before God and the people with a Christian
Coronation.

Indeed, the British peoples are, despite our materialism, Christian
and British societies in every sense, for even though we may not go to church,
even though we may not pray or even though some may deny the very existence of
God, the entire fabric of our being is based on the teachings of the Bible and
the practices of Christ, whether we may admit to it or not.

In times past we
absorbed the rituals of the Druids and other pagans but never lost sight of the
laws of God.

For a thousand years or more, peoples from other lands and faiths,
including the Moslem, have been welcomed into our society.

We do not demand
that they be Christian, but we do expect them to respect our Christian laws and
our Christian traditions.

Whilst so many
may tend to dismiss the European Human Rights action as something that would
never happen, I point to the words of the British High Court judge who recently
said he believed that even though Britain had signed a special protocol as part
of the Lisbon Treaty which was to ensure that the EU Charter of Rights would
not be enforceable in Britain, the EU law had unintentionally been incorporated
into British law anyway due to years of European interference in the law-making
functions of the British Parliament.

Supreme Court
Justice Lord Sumption, has recently warned that the European Court of Human
Rights exceeds its legitimate powers, usurps the role of politicians and
undermines the democratic process and Court of Appeal judge, Lord Justice Laws,
had said that the UK Supreme Court has accorded “overriding force to the notion that only Strasbourg’s rulings on the
convention are “definitive” or “authoritative'.”

In any event, it
is accepted that the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, which
enforces the European Convention on Human Rights, is compulsory and binding for
all 47 member states of the Council of Europe.

Did not Aesop
wisely say so very long ago “We often
give our enemies the means for our own destruction?”

Therefore,
whatever happens as far as this challenge is concerned, it is an indication
that there are people out there who want to destroy our way of life; who want
to eradicate forever our Christian and biblical heritage; who want to take our
kings away from God and make our shared monarchy a secular institution which
would be more acceptable to the European Union, and thus to bring it one step
away from oblivion.

I therefore travelled
to the UK from the other side of the world as a person bloodied in the fight to
protect our shared Crown to bring a warning that you must never ever take any
movement against the monarchy lightly.

A warning never to be complacent
whenever our shared Throne is under attack.

A warning never to allow complacency,
to dismiss out of hand anything that has the potential to grow, to nurture and
then to become a threat.

Wednesday, 16 July 2014

In my self-appointed role
as cultural critic of The Lanchester Review, I have been musing of the general
malaise of Western civilisation.It not just the dire economic performance of
the USA, Europe and Japan over the last twenty years (compared with, say, South
Korea and China in that same period), but it can be seen in wider culture. Whereas American culture helped destroy the Soviet Union, today Western culture
is all over the place.

In almost every art
form, the centre ground of culture is crumbling.In films and theatre the middle
ground has disappeared to be replaced by dumb blockbusters at one end, rehashing old films endlessly: how many reboots of Star Trek, Planet of the
Apes, Star Wars, and on and on, do we need?While at the high art end, it is
esoteric. Apart from the cultural in-crowd, nobody knows what is going on and nobody
else cares.It is not just films, though, but even documentaries. We used have
landmark series, such as The Ascent of Man and Civilisation.But now, we get Jeremy
Paxman presenting a series about the First World War, which he clearly knows
nothing about, and endless documentaries that seek to divide culture, such as The Art of Women, whatever that even means.

Why does this matter?It matters because it is out of the rich culture of the West that innovation
and progress come.It is not just the technical knowledge, which the Chinese
and Indians have in huge amounts, that produces the mobile phone and the drone. It is the riches of a free, vibrant mass culture.As an example, when most
people in Britain know only of Big Brother as a reality TV show, it does not fill you with confidence.As with a lot of things
wrong in the West, as well as a lot of what is right, this all began in the
1960s.The cultural zombies of that era refuse to die. This was brought home
while watching the Rolling Stones at Glastonbury on TV in 2013.Someone I was
watching with turned to me and said, ‘Why are those zombies singing?’Why, indeed?

Tuesday, 8 July 2014

If the Spanish Civil
War of 1936 to 1939 is recalled in Britain and in our celebrity obsessed,
narcissistic culture, then it is not recalled much; it is mainly for the artistic
impressions that have lasted, whether it is Hemmingway, Orwell or Picasso.

The
Spanish Civil War still has lessons for the world today.

The first, and most striking, is the involvement of outsiders in the conflict, on both sides.

There were the
famous International Brigades on the Republican side. But there were also
Italian and German forces on the Nationalist side.

The modern equivalent has to
be the Syrian Civil War. The idealistic young Muslims from Birmingham and
London going to Syria are echoing the socialist and communist youths of Britain
in the 1930s.

On the other side-in both senses-you have Iranian forces dying
for Assad just as the Italians and Germans were.

The Germans in particular saw
the conflict as a training ground for the future; Britain meanwhile was tying
itself in knots over non-intervention.

Although I cannot help but note that
Anthony Eden certainly had a more central role in international diplomacy than
William Hague does now.

This is in part because Britain was more diplomatically
significant, but also Hague’s dreary management consultant approach to foreign
affairs seems particularly ineffective, whereas Eden was making his reputation
at this point.

The second striking
fact is that there was no monopoly on murder and brutality. Summary executions
were used on both sides, in huge numbers.

While most decent people wanted the
Republic to win, there was no guarantee a democratic, peaceful Spain would have
emerged.

Just as in Syria today the only man left who thinks Assad’s defeat
will lead to a wonderful, peaceful democratic country is the millionaire Middle
Eastern ‘expert’ Tony Blair.

The one feature of the
war that does not seem modern is the vast difference of ideologues that were on
display in the Republican areas.

There were the official communists, backed by Stalin but with a moderate political programme. There was the POUM,
anti-Stalinist communists. There were the socialists, there were the
anarcho-syndicalists, and there were the Basque and Catalan nationalists.

In our
modern world, where the political debate in the West has been reduced to whether we want a full bloodied form of capitalism with the wealth getting most of the
benefits, or a system where they get slightly less, the diversity
and energy of these rival idea is striking.

For a brief period, most of the ideas were at least tried, even if only briefly.

The lasting impression
is the true horror of Civil War: families divided, the mass of suffering and
destruction, only punctuated occasionally by acts of heroism and kindness.

Spain is currently going through huge economic pain.

But just as Spain survived
the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship, so it will survive its current
problems and emerge a stronger nation.

Sunday, 6 July 2014

Feminism
is a pretty hard topic to write about, for everyone. It’s even harder for a
teenage boy. Particularly one from a public school where the ‘macho man’
stereotype still thrives.

Last year I wrote a blog about the No More Page 3 campaign and why we
should all support it and, following its publication, a number of my male
friends began to question my sexuality.

I know, I was surprised too: I was
completely unaware that feminism and homosexuality were linked in the teenage
mind. Apparently so.

But it’s not just guys who get ridiculed for their
feminist beliefs: we all do.

Whether it’s fighting for the right to vote or
trying to prove that ‘boobs aren’t news’, the feminist movement has been
laughed at, mocked and often ignored since it started. There’s even an
organisation out there trying to prevent equality for women.1

The
whole idea of misogyny and ‘anti-feminism’ completely and utterly bewilders me.
What is it about feminism that angers so many people? What on earth is wrong
with wanting equality?

In
my mind, everyone should be a feminist, and I use the word here to mean
somebody who wants equality amongst men and women. If you are not a feminist,
then you must be delusional.

There is no rationale behind the belief that women
are inferior and shouldn’t have equality. If you genuinely think there is,
please do enlighten me.

So why do so many shy away from the word ‘feminist’?
Why do some people actually believe that “The feminist
agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist,
anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands,
kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become
lesbians”?2

It’s pretty clear that feminism has a bad rep. In
fact, when people say they are feminists a common reaction is: “So you hate
men?”

There are a number of reasons for this, but this is the main one: there
are a few (and I mean very few) feminists who actually do have a problem with men, and sadly these are the feminists that
get into the news.

It is this same kind of skewed thinking that leads many members
of the public to believe that all Muslims want to implement Shariah law in the
UK and behead all non-Muslims: because there are one or two extremists, and
unfortunately they tend to make the press, giving a bad name to anyone who
associates themselves with the same label.

Valerie Solanas3 referred
to men as walking dildos, and this kind of misandrist belief goes against the
fundamental stance of feminism: that men and women are equal.

Just because one
or two radical feminists express their all-men-are-bastards beliefs does not
mean that all feminists hate men.

Trust me, I don’t hate myself; I hate
patriarchy.

And that’s another problem. Some feminists actually end up being
sexist themselves. In an effort to dispel patriarchal ideals and beliefs, some
feminists of the past have claimed that men are inferior.

Obviously, this
approach isn’t going to work either, and, in fact, is rather counterproductive.
Feminism is fighting for equality, not matriarchy.

In my view, the various nuances and sects of feminism
should be ignored and replaced by one single maxim: that people should not be
judged and subjugated due to their sex.

The failures of feminism in the past
and the stigma attached to it ought to be forgotten.

People should decide for
themselves what they believe ‘subjugation’ entails, and whether they believe
that things like porn or different punishments for men and women are sexist.

These topics have always and will always divide opinion. However, what should
not divide opinion is the drive for equality that ought to be at the centre of
the movement.

One particularly controversial topic is Page 3 of The Sun.

First printed in 1964, The Sun is a national tabloid newspaper that has an average daily
circulation of 2,409,811 copies.

In 1970, The
Sun had its first model standing nude on one of its pages. It seems almost
ludicrous to me, for a number of reasons, to have a topless woman in the UK’s
most-read newspaper. The No More Page 3
campaign agrees.

I personally have few problems with so-called ‘Lad’s Mags’
(although they too are going out of fashion), but the fact that The Sun thinks it is legitimate for a
national newspaper to display these images is what alienates me: it is on show
for the whole country to see.

Anybody could be reading The Sun anywhere, and young boys and girls are therefore likely to
be exposed to nudity from a very early age.

Now some may argue that it is the
parents’ duty to protect their children from this exposure; but is that realistic if, for example, there is a man sitting next to your child on a
train, ogling at the bare breasts on page 3?

The fact that The Sun is a newspaper makes men feel it is acceptable to look at
nude pictures in public places, where they would be very unlikely to read Nuts or Zoo. There are more appropriate places for sexualized images.

One of my other problems with page 3 is this: it
is incredibly embarrassing for our country.

To have more-than-soft porn
accessible in a newspaper in the twenty-first century makes me feel almost
humiliated to be English.

We are one of very few countries to still cling to
outdated institutions like page 3 and, in my view, it ought to be withdrawn.

Moreover, the message that page 3 sends to society is certainly not a good one:
that women are simply sex objects and images for men to gawk at. If feminism is
about equality, then page 3 contradicts its fundamental thesis.

For me, these
are the three most convincing arguments.

The reason that the No More Page 3 campaign has caused such controversy is that many
people mistakenly believe that the petition is calling for a ban.

No More
Page Three is not the first attempt to challenge page 3. In 1986 Clare
Short MP put a bill forward in the House of Commons explicitly asking for page
3 to be banned, saying that it is a “phenomenon in Britain’s press”.

She
received huge amounts of ridicule from the public saying she was “jealous” and
indeed many MPs at the time sneered at her in the House of Commons, making rude
and unpleasant personal remarks.

Given the enduring right of freedom of the
press, Clare Short’s proposed bill never became law.

By contrast, the No More Page 3 campaign is simply calling
for Dinsmore and Murdoch to reconsider the whole idea of page 3, in the hope
that they will realize how unbelievably outdated and damaging it really is.

The
campaigners are not trying to ban it, but only suggest to Dinsmore to “drop the
bare boobs from The Sun newspaper,”4 albeit rather
imperatively.

So why don’t we just have a boycott of The Sun? Well, it wouldn’t work.

The
fact is that nobody (or very few people indeed) who has signed the petition
actually reads The Sun on a regular
basis.

The campaigners may know people who read it, or their partners may read
it, but very few Sun readers have
signed the petition, and this is because they have no problem with page 3. If they
did have a problem with it, they wouldn’t buy it and they wouldn’t read it.

That is one of the reasons why many people argue that this petition is flawed.
Perhaps it is trying to take something many Sun
readers like away from them? If they want to get rid of it, then they should
simply stop buying it.

This is perhaps the main reason that I am unsure about
the petition: the majority of the supporters are likely to be middle-class
women who read papers like The Times and
The Guardian and who have only read The Sun once or twice in their lives.

It
therefore seems a bit unusual for page 3 to be taken away by people whom it affects
far less.

Nonetheless, I still disagree with page 3 and the message it sends,
and for that reason I have signed the petition: not in the hope that it is
banned, but in the hope that readers of The
Sun and supporters of page 3 realize how outdated and inappropriate it is.

For me, that is the most important thing: that the readers themselves begin to
support the campaign.

Yes, I support the campaign. No, this does not
make me homosexual. Yes, I do like boobs. But there’s a time and a place, and
until nude women are taken out of national newspapers, there can never be true
equality.

The fact that there are versions of Nuts etc. for females makes me less worried about magazines of that
sort.

However, when the pages of a national newspaper are filled with images of
important men in suits adjacent to images of topless ladies, something is
clearly not right. This is not equality.

For that reason, to be a feminist
means to oppose page 3.Thomas Bailey

Wednesday, 2 July 2014

Thus declared
Desmond Donnelly, the first ever Labour MP for Pembrokeshire, when launching
his Democratic Party after having lost the Labour Whip along with Woodrow Wyatt for
not voting in support of Harold Wilson’s bill to nationalise the steel industry.

Here we are some 47 years later, and little has changed. The country is still in decline, and feeble
men and women are still our nominal leaders.

The British electorate is stuck
with a government which has delegated the responsibility of governance of the
British Isles to an undemocratic unelected third party, the appointed Commissioners of the European Union.

Our Parliament is no longer
representative of the majority of the population.

Instead of a broad cross
section of the British working community, it is now filled with bright, academically qualified career politicians who have never really worked as most
of us would understand work, and who seem incapable of applying common
sense solutions as the answer to the problems of the day.

Our Parliament’s members should be
elected from across the spectrum of British commercial, academic and industrial life. Amongst the academics, there should be the electricians, the
motor mechanics, the steel workers, and so on, to bring that all-important balance to the
major debates on issues of the day which affect the lives of us all.

The British political system is
in a mess.

The Labour Party is past its use-by date, and no longer appears to be
able to govern in accordance with the wishes of the working population.

It now selects few working people
as its candidates, preferring to have university-educated members as its
parliamentarians. That is part of their problem.

Whilst university degrees
indicate higher levels of education, I am not aware of any university offering a
degree in common sense, which is a prime requisite that seems to be sadly
lacking in some representatives of the people.

Similarly, the Conservative Party
continues in much the same old way, represented in Parliament by members who
are from privileged, or at least comfortable, backgrounds, and who do not seem able to
understand the needs of the majority of the working British people.

There are those who describe
themselves as Liberal Democrats. In truth, they are neither Liberals nor Social
Democrats, since both of those parties continue separately.

Then there is a myriad of
numerous political parties, many of them single issue parties

And there is the Social Democratic Party.

The Social Democratic Party has
almost been forgotten by some, and never heard of by younger members of the
population.

D is the central letter of the
SDP logo. It represents the word democracy. Government of the people, by the
people, for the people.

In a real democracy, the
government is expected to carry out the will of the people who elected it into
office. I doubt that that has happened since the post war Labour government of
Clement Atlee was defeated.

Principle political parties have
produced their election manifestos, and upon being elected to power have failed
to deliver, simply because the two principal parties do not put the interest of
the electorate to the fore. They are obliged instead to serve, as a first
priority, their respective paymasters.

The Social Democratic Party is an
independent party currently financed by its members’ contributions and fundraising activities.

As an independent party, we are not beholden to any interest
group, and would be able to govern according to the wishes of the electorate,
not the financiers.

To have a truly representative
and democratically elected SDP government, we take care in selecting our
candidates, who have to convince us that their principal reason to seek election
is to represent their fellow-constituents in addition to the country at large.

We
would wish to have elections based on a proportional representation electoral
system, which Social Democrats have always advocated, and which is only to be
expected from a democratic party such as ours.

With a proportional
representation system, we would anticipate higher turnouts on polling days, as
electors would understand that their votes would
count.

Is the SDP left-wing, right-wing,
middle of the road?

Members have debated this, the conclusion being neither.

We
believe that we are a party of social justice and would govern accordingly. We consider that all
but the bone idle, the selfish and the greedy could live comfortably with
a Social Democratic administration.

Furthering the promotion of
democracy, it would be the intention of the SDP to repeal the European
Communities Act 1972.

We are committed democrats, and passionately believe that
these islands of Britain should be governed by no others than those whom the
British people have elected to our national Parliament. We are not necessarily anti-Europe, but do oppose monetary and political union.

The SDP has always supported the
concept of a mixed economy with contributions from State, Private and Cooperative
enterprises, where there would be adequate investment opportunities for those
with capital to invest.

We consider that energy, water, transport and health should be operated on a service to the consumer basis and should be
taken into public ownership. Surpluses should be generated but for reinvestment
only, and not to provide incomes to investors.

The SDP has always advocated that income tax and National Insurance contributions should be unified into a single
collection. We would wish to extend that into developing a national pension
fund to be invested in British business.

An English parliament would be
established. VAT would be removed from
utility bills. Export of live animals for
slaughter would be stopped. Utility prices to be universal
for everyone, whatever payment method was employed. Matrons would be reinstated to all
hospital wards.

The high cost of housing would be
tackled by building more affordable homes for rent and capping the price of
bought properties. Solar panels would be included in
the design specifications for all new residential and commercial buildings.

We are continually developing a
range of policies, which we are confident will satisfy the political
requirements of the people.

There needs to be a radical
change in the way that Britain is to be governed in this twenty-first century, and we consider that, as a party whose membership is comprised of
educated and common sense working people, we are the party to do it.